Courtesans of the establishment

We are not suffering a deluge of bad news. We are suffering a deluge of bad news reporting.

From CNN’s Debate Performance Was Villainous and Shameful by Matt Taibbi. There is outrage among Sanders supporters, end even some more mainstream Democrats, at the naked political shenanigans by CNN reporters and commentators at the most recent little-watched debate.

There is a general sense that the establishment DNC is panicking because the second and third-ranked candidates after all this time and all these debates are elderly unworldly committed socialists. For some reason they fear this outcome of their reformed and considered democratic nomination process.

The specific issue is that CNN broke a story just before the debates with a claim that Sanders told Warren that a woman could not be President of the US. This seemed so manufactured, so clearly an establishment tactic to knee-cap Sanders, so improbable and so thinly sourced (it all boiled down to a claim by Warren without any documentation, video or eye-witness support) that Sanders supporters erupted on social media.

In 2016 I was working on an extended project with a tech client in San Francisco. I was in the belly of the beast with far left dreamers tussling with committed Marxists and Sanders supporters all vying for extreme dissociation form reality. Sanders supporters were livid at their perception of his mistreatment by Washington's establishment DNC who had pre-anointed Hillary Clinton and would brook no consideration of a real Socialist.

And now it all happening again. Biden is a broken reed but from the DNC perspective he is all they have and Sanders and Warren need to be taken out of the running. What better way than to use their house organ CNN to peddle fake news to fan a non-issue.

But the problem was, for any non-partisan, was that there was no reporting going on. This was all amateur hour manipulation by the powers-that-be. From Taibbi.

CNN debate moderator Abby Phillip asked Bernie Sanders in the Tuesday debate in Des Moines:

“CNN reported yesterday — and Senator Sanders, Senator Warren confirmed in a statement — that, in 2018, you told her you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”

Not “did you say that,” but “why did you say that?”

Sanders denied it, then listed the many reasons the story makes no sense: He urged Warren herself to run in 2016, campaigned for a female candidate who won the popular vote by 3 million votes, and has been saying the opposite in public for decades. “There’s a video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States,” he said.

Phillip asked him to clarify: He never said it? “That is correct,” Sanders said. Phillip turned to Warren and deadpanned: “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?”

That “when” was as transparent a media “fuck you” as we’ve seen in a presidential debate. It evoked memories of another infamous CNN ambush, when Bernard Shaw in 1988 crotch-kicked Mike Dukakis with a question about whether he’d favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, Kitty.

This time, the whole network tossed the mud. Over a 24-hour period before, during, and after the debate, CNN bid farewell to what remained of its reputation as a nonpolitical actor via a remarkable stretch of factually dubious reporting, bent commentary, and heavy-handed messaging.

The cycle began with a “bombshell” exposé by CNN reporter MJ Lee. Released on the eve of the debate, Lee reported Warren’s claim that Sanders told her a woman couldn’t win in a December 2018 meeting.

Lee treated the story as fact, using constructions such as, “Sanders responded that he did not think a woman could win,” and “the revelation that Sanders expressed skepticism that Warren could win.”

Lee said “the conversation” opened a window into “the role of sexism and gender inequality in politics”: The conversation also illustrates the skepticism among not only American voters but also senior Democratic officials that the country is ready to elect a woman as president …

Although Lee said she based the story on “the accounts of four people,” they were “two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter,” and “two people familiar with the meeting.” There were only two people in the room, Sanders and Warren. Lee’s “four people” actually relied on just one source, Warren.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same construction that’s driven countless other shaky stories in the past, from WMD reports to Russiagate speculations. An unconfirmable hearsay story is conveyed by one source, who gives the reporter the numbers of two or three other people in the office who’ve heard the same tale from the same place. Voilà: A one-source pony is now factual “according to several people familiar with the matter.”

As Taibbi notes:

After the debate, Trump fans online were in full schadenfreude mode, crowing about how “the left” finally understood that CNN really is fake news. Overall, #CNNisgarbage trended and #fuckCNN wasn’t far behind.

I think this misses a point. It's not just Trump fans. Certainly them, but also moderates, independents, and centrist democrats can all see, can't avoid seeing, that what is claimed as just-the-facts news is actually interventionist partisan manipulation and misrepresentation.

For classical liberals/conservatives/moderates this is some vindication. The man behind the curtain is so obvious that virtually everyone is tacitly acknowledging that this is all fake news delivers in a fashion that contravenes all or conceptions of fairness and reality.

One politician floats an accusation against another with no evidentiary basis. It is a claim that, were it true, would be advantageous to the accuser. The establishment organ then runs the playbook which due-process loving, reality adhering classical liberals abhor. The press treated an unsubstantiated claim as real, prosecuted the case as if the mere claim made it true, hashed out the implications of the alleged but unproven and improbable claim, then extended the unsubstantiated allegation against the individual into a totalitarian indictment:

Lee said “the conversation” opened a window into “the role of sexism and gender inequality in politics”: The conversation also illustrates the skepticism among not only American voters but also senior Democratic officials that the country is ready to elect a woman as president …

It is all nonsense. The pay-for-play centrist establishment Democrats are of course abhorred by Classical Liberals, Trump supporters, Tea Party enthusiasts, etc. Now they are making it obvious to moderates and to the far left just how discreditable they are. Now that's what I call a big umbrella.

All facilitated by the mainstream media, courtesans of the establishment.